WEBINAR:On-Demand

On Wednesday, Jan. 8, at 11 a.m. PST/2 p.m. EST/7 p.m. GMT, @eWEEKNews will host its 82nd monthly #eWEEKChat. The topic will be, "New Trends in New-Gen Security." It will be moderated by Chris Preimesberger, eWEEK's editor of features and analysis.

Some quick facts:

Topic: #eWEEKchat Jan. 8: "Trends in New-Gen Security"

Date/time: Wednesday, Jan. 8, 11 a.m. PST/2 p.m. EST/7 p.m. GMT

Further reading

Tweetchat handle: You can use #eWEEKChat to follow/participate via Twitter itself, but it's easier and more efficient to use the real-time chat room link at CrowdChat. Instructions are on that page; log in at the top right, use your Twitter handle to register, and the chat begins promptly at 11am PT. The page will come alive at that time with the live discussion. You can join in or simply watch the discussion as it is created. Special thanks to John Furrier of SiliconAngle.com for developing the CrowdChat app.

Our in-chat experts will include: Val Bercovici, CEO and founder of PencilDATA; Corie Scobie, CTO of Chef; Stephen Manley, CTO at Druva; Gabriel Gumbs, Chief Innovation Officer at Spirion; Vittorio Viarengo of McAfee MVISION Cloud; Jason Garbis, VP of security products at Cyxtera; more to be added. Attendees can offer their own perspectives at any time.

What, in Fact, Are Trends in New-Gen Security?

Yes, we know: It is impossible to have too many good ideas in the cybersecurity business. But we still need to keep them coming, because the bad actors keep putting distance between themselves and conventional platforms.

One major problem situation needing help: Is cybercrime-as-a-service poised to become an actual business trend? Don't be surprised to see it happen in 2020.

Security-breach news became so common in 2019 that readers' eyes often glazed over at the headlines. Ransomware and phishing, as in 2018, were out of control; state-run hackers were working around the clock and making money; passwords were leaked; sophisticated malware attacks kept spreading; data was breached and governments around the world once again worked around privacy rules—despite the first full year of the General Data Protection Regulation, a set of international rules set by the European Union in May 2018.

On Jan.1, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect and will have wide-ranging influence on business throughout the world, not only in California—the world’s fifth-largest GDP economy behind China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom—if you don’t count the overall leader, the U.S. itself.

Read eWEEK columnist Wayne Rash’s take on how the CCPA may cause major confusion among U.S. businesses large and small.

Oh, and don't forget the concerted nation-state misinformation campaigns from countries such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran designed to influence U.S. voters through social networks in the 2020 major U.S. elections. Networks such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others again found themselves spinning their wheels on how to mitigate hate speech, fake news pages, false memes and myriad other cultural poisons being published on their web pages.

An ongoing bad-guy trend involves cryptominers and crypto-related threats as a whole. In fact, cryptominers have taken the world by storm, becoming the leading attack vector used by threat actors in 2017 and continuing through 2019, overtaking even the ransomware wave. So far, cryptominers have greatly improved their capabilities as well as upgraded their targets array: servers, mobile devices, industrial systems and cloud infrastructure--no one is left behind.

To provide organizations with the best level of protection, security experts must be forever attuned to the ever-changing landscape and the latest threats and attack methods.

RSA Always a Showplace for Security Innovation

We can expect a good deal of innovation to be exhibited at the annual RSA Conference in San Francisco Feb. 24-28. Security experts and practitioners from all over the globe will witness to some new ideas and services that either are already in the market or are soon to become available.

Another major trend that again will be discussed involves the many efforts to gain visibility into closed-off environments such as IoT devices, edge systems and a variety of cloud environments.

Well-established companies continue to play major roles in infosec innovation. RSA, Sophos, Symantec, Trend Micro, Fortinet, FireEye, Proofpoint, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, AVG, Imperva, CyberArk and Webroot are among the largest security providers in the world. They got to that status because they have had substantial success previously.

Are Behavioral Biometrics Still a Key to New-Gen Security?

We've known for a long while that passwords, firewalls and private networks simply aren't sufficient for tight IT security anymore. It's all too easy for even a semi-sophisticated cyber-criminal to scan for passwords and find back doors into personal and business data that sooner or later amount to illicit money in a thief's bank account.

Thus, the race has been on to develop workable alternatives, with behavioral biometrics being one of the more promising ones. Behavioral biometrics is an additional layer of security that provides seamless, continuous user authentication. It works by collecting and evaluating a mix of behavior patterns, from the way we move our hand on a mobile device screen or with a mouse, to create advanced behavioral algorithms to establish a user's profile.

The next time that person uses the service, the technology will rate current interactions against his/her profile and provide a recommended action to allow, challenge or block access to the account. These patterns are continuously monitored and analyzed-- frictionlessly in the background--to provide continuous account protection.

What makes behavioral biometrics so intriguing is that it's virtually impossible to precisely imitate another person's behavior, unlike static biometrics (fingerprint, retina, etc.), which can be stolen and reused.

Questions We Will Ask

Anyway, those are merely a few of the topics we can discuss Wednesday. In this month's eWEEKchat, we'll be asking the following, among other questions:

What is your take on important security trends in this new decade?

Can we deploy behavioral biometrics for more widespread usage?

How will we be able to defend all the new attack surfaces we are now using in IoT, edge computing and mobile computing?

All of the following approaches are certainly viable for various data security use cases, but do you see any particular advantages for file, network, cloud, software-defined or container-based security coming in 2020?

What new security devices, software and services might we expect to see in 2020?

Will Facebook and Google continue to make improvements in their data privacy processes in 2020?

Will we ever be able to get a handle on keeping data secure? Will we ever be able to completely screen out the bad human elements?

Can we ever have a completely secure election using IT in the United States?

Could the fast development of cognitive computing turn into a serious problem? Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking are among the most prominent worriers about this.

Can we expect any type of improvement in online personal data privacy in 2020?

Chris J. Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor-in-Chief of eWEEK and responsible for all the publication's coverage. In his 15 years and more than 4,000 articles at eWEEK, he has distinguished himself in reporting...

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